Martha How is the Pacific in the evening? Wobbly like a drunk or a toddler. In the lounge of the Diana Star, the passengers are singing karaoke in the dark. On a wall is an enormous projection of words, in blue font bordered with white, marching against a backdrop of phantoms. Nowadays, all karaoke videos […]

Animal voices are annoying, says my writer friend, spinning her spoon on the table. We have met over coffee to discuss writing, something we do periodically though I have no innate sense of direction and am always late to our meetings. We speak hurriedly in a café west of the city, rain falling against the glass eleven days after it started, La Nina having been declared for the second year in a row. The month is November.

I am in a world of women and they are everything. That is why I carry the labeller with me, so I can allocate each woman to their rightful place. It is a secret thing, the labeller, small enough to hide in the palm of my hand or tuck into the front flap of a basketball bag. It prints little tags of invisible plastic that adhere neatly to the forehead. Sometimes, after I have slept with someone, and they already have a forehead label, I glue the new classification over their breasts while they sleep. Other times, I just stick over it. The label is soft in its rigidity.

Readers of this journal will be aware that there have been numerous historical instances of children discovered in the care of creatures as varied as chimpanzees, wolves and elephants; and, of course, many more unverified accounts exist, from the case documented by Professor Oskar König in ‘The Bat Boy of Bersenbrück’ to the unlikely tale of the Lithuanian girl who was rumoured to have grown up within a hive of bees.

Of the many stories we read, ‘The Case of G: A Child Raised by Trains’ was easily one of the most original takes on the travel theme. Framed as an article for an academic journal, Dearborn’s story follows the case of an impoverished child found living among trains. One of those trains in fact—the 6.55 am from Greenhill Station—the young girl has taken to calling ‘ma’.

When school was done and the hall swept and mopped, when we’d taken Mrs Hamilton’s scraps to the chooks and polished our shoes, as the days lengthened into November we were allowed to run out on the mudflats. We’d play cricket in the cold breeze, if Mr Baye would unlock the bat and ball, and dig for pipis for Mrs Hamilton, who said they improved her soups.

We shoulda known it. Barnett and that bank shot of his. The Piney Vista Drive-In’s what he called it, a wonderment of entertainment technology ginned up out of – typical Barnett fashion – nothing. “Spiney vision?” said Lynch. “Piney Vista,” said Barnett. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes.

The questions should be explicit, things like when and how long for and where in the house will an extra person sleep. Then there is the issue of payment: whether there is any, to start, and then if so how much and if not money for board then perhaps for food or power or Netflix, or will the houseguest be expected to help instead with other matters – the cleaning of rooms, the caring of children, the contributing to family life in some other, less tangible way.

Winner: Jenah Shaw | The houseguest For such a formally inventive story – a mosaic of descriptive and narrative passages of varying lengths and degrees of evocativeness, ‘sorted’ under subject headings – it’s remarkable that ‘The houseguest’ feels so warmly humane and is such fun to read. The narration has an intriguingly hypothetical tone and […]

The victim’s stomach is filled with water. A hose is placed in the throat. A plank is then placed across the distended stomach. And the kempeitai soldiers, one on each end,

Afterwards, a counsellor came to school to follow us around. Her name was Klara. Our headmaster introduced her to our grade at assembly and told us why she was here, then at lunch she zeroed in on our table and came and plopped herself down, right next to me. I thought about messing with her, saying that I’d once strung Max along for months, pretending I was into him till I finally told him he was a loser, a weirdo, not worth my time.

On the southern edge of the Nullarbor we stop to stretch our legs and I find phone reception strong enough to call my father. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘have you considered changing your name?’ His messages have been banking up for several days as the tour weaves in and out of range. We haven’t spoken more than once, I know, since I got out of prison.

The stories submitted for the 2019 VU Short Story Prize were incredibly impressive. Even the long list I read would make an amazing snapshot of the short story in 2019. In the end, I chose the stories that moved something inside me – a twist that made my stomach drop, a perfectly imagined moment that moved me to tears, a clever wit that made me laugh out loud.

Sure enough, he would discover a patch of green grass in the grey dust, a shady willow springing out amongst the gumtrees like an oasis. Sometimes, they were able to hear the Darling River nearby if they paused in carving out arrows and swords for their next game.

One of the exciting aspects of reading the entries for this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers was the breadth of writing, the range of voices, subjects and styles, which is reflected in this year’s winners.